Roadside religion

Timothy Beal's epiphany occurred on a drive from Washington, D.C., to Cleveland. Near Frostburg, Md., a hulking assemblage of reddish girders four stories high suddenly loomed alongside Interstate 68. A bold, blue sign explained:

"NOAH'S ARK BEING REBUILT HERE!"

The following summer, Beal, a religion professor at Case Western Reserve University, found himself in a rented motor home with the wife and kids, exploring the Frostburg ark and other astonishing spiritual tourist attractions. Among them: Kentucky's cheesy and oddly named Golgotha Fun Park (a miniature golf course, now defunct); the world's largest Ten Commandments display; and the world's largest rosary collection in Stevenson, Wash.

Beal's odyssey has wrought "Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange and the Substance of Faith," published just in time for vacation planning or beach reading.

However quirky, Beal says, the 10 sites he examined in nine states manifest believers' desire to create some "otherworldly realm" set apart from ordinary life. And each destination is a story about an individual's faith.

The idea for an ark replicated to vast biblical proportions originated in 1974, when pastor Richard Greene said God commissioned his task in night visions: Ridicule has only reinforced his Noah-like persistence.

Greene has suffered through breaks with his Church of the Brethren, the loss of some followers and complaints about financial mismanagement -- and over the decades, his God's Ark of Safety Ministry has raised only enough money to pour a foundation of 3,000 tons of concrete and erect part of the framework.

Yet Beal found the Quixote-like effort moving, and says that after visiting Greene he lamented his own "lack of faith and inability to hope for an absurd miracle."

He's less indulgent of the world's largest Ten Commandments, on display at Fields of the Wood east of Murphy, N.C. The 216-acre site, operated by the Church of God of Prophecy, also boasts of the world's largest altar and world's largest New Testament, both in concrete.

The commandments are presented in concrete letters, five-feet tall, marked off by 10-foot Roman numerals. The sacred text can only be read from an adjacent hillside or by air.

Beal accuses the sponsors of turning God's Word into an idol.

"These giant hillside tablets deserve a prize for irony, making a graven image of the prohibition against graven images," he says.

Yet Beal turns respectful again when he encounters the awesome piety of Bill Rice's Cross Garden outside Prattville, Ala. It consists of thousands of makeshift wooden crosses strewn across 11 acres, interspersed with rusting appliances, other junk and placards proclaiming urgent -- if ungrammatical -- messages, such as "IN HELL FROM SEX SEX" and "RICH MAN IN HELL REPENT".

Like Greene, house painter Rice received visions in 1977 that told him to warn passersby of impending judgment and God's remedy. He began by planting three crosses in the front yard, dreading what the neighbors would think. One cross just led to another.

"You don't take it in. It takes you in," Beal marvels.

The Rice extravaganza is an example of what aesthetes call "outsider art," folk works by self-taught visionaries. A far better-known practitioner was the late evangelist-handyman Howard Finster, whose weather-beaten Paradise Gardens outdoor gallery at Summerville, Ga., is also toured by Beal.

After completing the book, Beal came upon an obscure artist right where he lives. Albert Wagner, 82, has filled his Cleveland home with his own distinctive paintings, which blend Pentecostalism with Egyptian and African themes. Wagner leads small worship services down in the basement.

Kirkus Reviews called the book condescending of its subjects, but Beal said that's not the case. He is struck that Wagner and the others he has encountered need to express "a radical, private experience in such a public, spectacular way."

Beal's Unitarian publisher calls the author an atheist, but he depicts himself as an ambivalent quester. He was raised in Alaska by Presbyterian parents who were leaders in the evangelical Young Life organization. He met his wife Clover, who was raised Pentecostal, at evangelical Seattle Pacific University, when both were drifting from the faith of their youth.

Today, Clover is pastor of the liberal Forest Hill Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights, and Timothy sometimes helps out teaching Sunday School.

Reflecting on his travels, Beal says that people like himself who forsake evangelicalism "don't tend to revisit that particular culture or theological tradition with much sympathy." Yet he had to recapture some of the old warmth to understand what he was observing.

It hasn't been unusual for Beal to investigate the far margins of faith.

He teaches a course on "religion and horror" and has written a book titled "Religion and Its Monsters." His original drive past the Frostburg ark occurred after a research trip to the Library of Congress, where he was looking into the use of the Bible by white supremacists.